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Walk through the steps you need to build your very own WordPress theme! Included with the book is a WordPress theme and other necessary files, so roll up your sleeves and let Joe take you through the process explaining what you need to do - and why you’re doing it - every step of the way. Hi, I’m Joe, the author of Building WordPress Themes From Scratch, and what started out as a simple, open source blogging platform has now become a super-powerful content management system (CMS) that can boast that it’s the most widely-used CMS on the Internet. From the moment I first started using WordPress about eight years ago, I fell in love with it straight away and immediately started hacking away at it, learning the platform, making my own changes, and watching it grow over the years. In this book, I plan to teach you how to use WordPress, as well as how to leverage the API to create your own custom themes, plugins, and content types. In other words, I will show you how to make WordPress your own. I’d like to say that this book is for anyone interested in WordPress, regardless of background. However, to keep it streamlined, I do assume that you have a solid understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL. I will be look­ing at converting HTML to a WordPress theme, building plugins, and more, all from scratch. So, if you’d like to learn how to do all of this, then this book will be right up your alley! Packaged with this book, you will find: 1) A fully functioning WordPress theme called ‘Director’. 2) A set of PSD files for the Homepage, Directory Page, Blog, and Single Business Page. 3) A set of HTML files created from the PSDs. They will be used to create the ‘Director’ WordPress theme. 4) On top of the four pages created from the PSDs, the HTML folder also includes a /css/ folder for four CSS files: style.css, reset.css, master.css, and ie.css. APlus, al images used in the HTML template are also included. WHAT THIS BOOK COVERS: This book reads much like a long, multi-part tutorial, where I take you through my design process, explaining what I do (and why I do it) every step of the way. Although it’s a fairly linear guide, my hope is that you can visit any main section of the book for quick reference. So, here’s what I’ll be doing: 1. Converting HTML/CSS to a Dynamic WordPress Theme Included with the book is a PSD that I’ve transformed into HTML. The first part of this book will be taking the resulting HTML/CSS and converting it to a WordPress theme. Along the way, I’ll talk about the various theme pages we’re working with, the WordPress theme hierarchy, and of course, the WordPress Loop. 2. Creating a Custom Post Type This, in my humble opinion, is one of the best additions to WordPress in recent releases. With the ability to make your own content types — each with its own theme template — you can take WordPress from being a CMS only limited to blog posts and pages, to a CMS that can manage any kind of content you can imagine. In this book, we’ll be creating a business listing type, which will allow us to create a business directory. 3. Theme Options and Widgets With WordPress, you can make a theme your own by adding a ‘theme options’ page and custom widgets. In this section, we’ll make it very easy for people who use our themes to add their own cus­tomizations without delving into the code or creating a child theme. 4. Creating a Plugin One of the most powerful facets of WordPress is the fact that it’s pluggable. We can add func­tionality to our installation of WordPress without changing the core WordPress files. There are vast directories of both free and premium plugins available that vastly expand the capabilities of WordPress. In this final section of this book, we will build our own plugin.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Joe Casabona is a web developer, writer, and teacher. He hails from Middletown, New York and has been making websites since 2002. His good friend Stephen Mekosh introduced him to WordPress in 2004 and he’s been working with it ever since. Joe also writes for WordPress Tuts+ and the Appstorm network. Check him out at casabona.org or on Twitter at @jcasabona.

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There isn't a book that gives me what I need for wordpress - yet. However, combining a few together is getting me there. This is one of them.

The author takes you from a set of photoshop pages and beats them into wordpress templates. And you learn along the way.

This is good for part of what I need. However, the book is too literal for me. By that, I mean he doesn't give enough theory to go along with the practical information. If what I was going to do was take some photoshopped pages and slice and dice them - which by the way isn't included here - this would be a great book for me. Especially if I was going to do exactly what he's doing.

I want the step-by-step. At 52, I NEED the step-by-step! I need also to understand the 'why' of the 'what'. Why are we doing what we're doing so I can take it to the next project. I want to customize a theme I have now - heavily. But the information on how to do that is spread around like Nutella on a piece of wheat toast. Thinly. I don't like Nutella, btw.

I want the do this and then the why we did this in one book. Plus, I want the "if that didn't work" part, too. This book, like almost all I've seen on WP, assumes the stuff you do works.

To be fair, while creating a wordpress.com blog is a trivial thing and even installing and configuring WP to run locally on a XAMPP stack is fairly mundane, the guts of WP are not. Not simple. Not straightforward. Instead, WP uses a lot of pieces, spread all over, to do its thing. Which is a good thing - unless you're new to it all.

I need a "Practical WordPress Bible" with lots of tech along the way. While this ain't it, it's a great piece of the puzzle. It's even good in Kindle form - which is how I have it.

Pretty good book. This is my first WP Themes book and I'm learning so much! For a starter like me this book is just great. I highly recommend looking at the code live on your computer while reading the book and referencing the WP Codex to really understand what goes on and what each WP function does. If you want to learn, read this book.

I built my own blog theme a month or so ago, following a tutorial and thought it was quite a simple page (visually) but the code and organization was overly complicated and difficult to edit for what it was. I also rebuilt themes that already existed but I also thought that was way too difficult. I thought OK maybe I just hate WordPress and should just stick to HTML and CSS.

I decided to buy this book to see if it would change my mind. It took me three sitting to read through and finish the theme. I don't really know PHP, I know a little JavaScript. I know HMTL and CSS fairly well. There was one section in the book where you were editing the directory.html, I thought this section was a little sloppy in explaining (maybe I was just tired). My theme has a few problems and to be honest I'm not interested enough to fix them. I think I just don't have an interest in WordPress, I'm not sure. I'm not taking that out on the author, 4-stars.

When you buy this book you get a link to send your receipt to and they send you the digital copy for free, which is helpful when writing a lot of code (copy/paste). It's written in a pleasing way, light humor/sarcasm and simplistic (not wordy).

One thing that would have been nice is if the theme you were creating in the end were more interesting. I'm a graphics major so I like glitz. Granted I can go in and change colors and different elements and move things around, but I've been there and done that. One thing I can say is that the author is very clean and organized in his code, which is something that I can't say about the other tutorial I did on a blog theme.

The best aspect of this book is that the author, Joe Casabona explains how Wordpress' template structure works and which files to modify to get the best results. He also gives you the basics of the functions file which helps you add features to Wordpress. If you work with a basic starter theme like Chris Coyier's blank theme or the Starkers theme, this book can be a great companion.

First, I'll say that I'm very experienced with PHP, over 6 years of advanced level PHP development of all kinds.

I've been developing CMS sites for clients in PHP for years. When I started, WordPress wasn't as capable as it is now, and so I was forced to either implement a very complicated CMS for a client who only needed simple features, or build my own simple CMS. However, custom post types changed that, and Joe does a great job of introducing and guiding developers on how to implement custom post types for WordPress. Joe also discusses Plugin development, and the all-powerful shortcode. I'd have otherwise spent weeks in the codex to get the value I got in one weekend from this book.

I would say the first half of this book is great for any front end designer (HTML/CSS). The PHP for WordPress basics are more of a templating system than doing any real programming. Joe demonstrates how easy it is for any developer/designer to get in and turn their own HTML layouts into WordPress themes. However I would caution readers, if you're not experienced in PHP, don't expect more, as the custom post type implementations (or anything in the second half of the book) do require you to grasp some basic/intermediate programming concepts.

For coders, I give this book 5 starsFor front end designers, I give this book 4 stars